


Five times Luisa Cortés was told there was nothing she could have done (and one time she went ahead and did something anyway)

by Chestnut_filly



Series: Actual Fic [8]
Category: Y tu mamá también (2001)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Death, Fic, Gen, Growing Up, POV Female Character, Terminal Illnesses
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-21
Updated: 2016-10-21
Packaged: 2018-08-23 21:02:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,462
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8342596
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chestnut_filly/pseuds/Chestnut_filly
Summary: Luisa Alvarado Cortés hates the phrase, “there was nothing you could have done,” more than any other grouping of words in any language she can think of, except perhaps the more proactive, “there’s nothing you can do.” Nothing sets her teeth more on edge than someone well-meaning reminding her of her own futility in the midst of tragedy.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Though technically no Archive warnings apply to this fic, it does deal with death (of both old people and adolescents), car accidents, terminal illness, and bastard cheating boyfriends.

1.

Luisa Alvarado Cortés hates the phrase, “there was nothing you could have done,” more than any other grouping of words in any language she can think of, except perhaps the more proactive, “there’s nothing you can do.” Nothing sets her teeth more on edge than someone well-meaning reminding her of her own futility in the midst of tragedy. 

The first person to ever-so-kindly slide that knife between her ribs was a woman with tired eyes from the child protection agency, who’d been so benevolent as to sit beside Luisa on the dingy couch squished into her office while trying to explain to her why she’d be going to live with her Tía Dolores from now on. 

Luisa, six years old and more confused than bereaved, not quite understanding what her parents, a car crash, and scary Tía Dolores had to do with each other and figuring that this must be some punishment for an unknown transgression, asked, “Did I do something wrong?” 

The woman’s eyes just became a shade more tired, and she said, “No, chiquita, you didn’t do anything wrong. I promise, there was nothing you could have done.” 

Something about that broad reassurance -done about _what?-_ was enough to pierce the fog of six-year-old confusion, pull back the curtain on mortality a bit. The finality of the words and the woman’s tone was enough that Luisa, who was already tired and disoriented and scared at the thought of living with Tía Dolores, began to cry. 

She cried until Tía Dolores came stomping through the door in a cloud of acrid lavender perfume, signed some relevant paperwork, and half dragged her, still sobbing, through the door. 

“I want mamá!” she hiccoughed, trying to pull away from her aunt’s bony grasp on her hand. Tía Dolores just shifted her grip to her wrist and said, “Well, there’s nothing I can do about that.” 

 

2.

Francisco Javier, named thusly by a mother who’d started labor too soon for Franco’s death but finished soon enough after to judiciously slap another name on to hedge her bets, was everything a sheltered sixteen-year-old girl who lived in a world of lavender perfume, lace doilies, and be-taloned aunts could have wanted from a boyfriend- rebellious as any American teen film star on the outside with his leather jacket and motorcycle, and really about as scary as a marshmallow on the inside. 

Tía Dolores, who had never been anything but a harsh crocodile of a guardian for the ten years Luisa had spent with her, had quietly been growing gaunter and angrier, snapping at Luisa all the more but never backing it up with her lacquered nails as she once had. For whatever the reason -adolescence, the first stirrings of pride in the attention she was getting from boys, simple weariness of ten years of errors and doilies- Luisa felt ready to look outside her aunt’s walls. And, well. Francisco Javier was right there with his earring and chipped smile, wasn’t he? 

That’s how it started, anyway. As Tía Dolores kept getting thinner and meaner and the money, which had never exactly been plentiful, started hemorrhaging out to doctors and pharmacists and herbalists, Luisa saw her world getting smaller and smaller, narrowing down to the house with its scrap of garden, her aunt’s bedroom and its ever-increasing pharmacopeia, her claustrophobic Extremadura town with one church and one bar and one high school and nothing, nothing at all for a girl who wanted to see the world. 

She fell desperately in love with Francisco Javier in both senses of the word desperate. The hours she could snatch away from the lavender-over-sickness stench of her aunt were the only things keeping her from cracking at the thought of being trapped here as a nurse for the rest of her life, seeing the church and the bar and the school every day and never even tasting what the world had to offer. When Javi let her drive the motorcycle over the dusty roads leading out of town, or when they plotted their move to the Côte d’Azur (as soon as they could find the money, as soon as she graduated, as soon as they possibly could) she loved him as deeply as she loved the open road for giving her that freedom. He was her rebellion and her escape and her everything in the way that only teenagers can manage, and only ever once. 

In the end it was the town that killed him, though later Luisa would always say it was the bike, the awful, postage-stamp town that was too small to have a stoplight at its one intersection. She was hovering outside the school doors one blazingly hot afternoon, waiting for Javi to come pick her up on the bike and take her anywhere else. She heard his engine well before she saw him, but apparently the roar of the motor wasn’t enough to penetrate the aluminum siding of a beat-up old SEAT Fura, and the little town without a stoplight let it run right into Javi. 

Luisa remembered the crash and its aftermath in protectively disjointed flashes- scalp, tire, blood, screaming, glass. The town’s one policeman, drawing her out of the middle of the road next to the twisted wreck of the bike, saying, “He died instantly. There was nothing you could have done.” 

It was bad enough at the time, of course, but the real twist of the knife came one week later, the day after the burial, when Luisa was sorting through the cardboard box that Javi’s mother had wordlessly shoved at her by the graveside. Javi’s leather jacket, which he’d left off in concession to the heat on the day of the crash. A few Polaroid photos of the two of them in a plastic organizer. A map of the Côte d’Azur, a route marked out in blue pen. The policeman’s voice slipped back into Luisa’s head- “‘There was nothing you could have done.” The second time, past the immediate, awful shock of blood and splintered glass on the asphalt, staring at her impossible, dead-on-arrival escape route, she heard it differently. _There was nothing you could have done to get out of here. You’ll never, ever leave._

Tía Dolores, who had been in bed since the funeral the day before, called querulously from upstairs, demanding another blanket and an aspirin. Luisa, standing automatically and moving towards the linen closet, felt the boundaries of the town growing tighter and tighter until she felt they could suffocate her. 

She threw out the map and shoved the rest of the box deep under her bed. When the school guidance counselor tried to talk understandingly to her about her grades and her attendance, she took the pamphlet on vocational training he held out to her without saying a word. Her new job (sucking spit, Julio would someday call it) got her one town over, at least, a scant fifteen miles of escape each day. Always, though, her aunt’s parchment-thin skin and coarse bones dragged her back. She wrapped what cash she could save in Javi’s jacket under her bed and chafed and chafed and chafed. 

 

 

3. 

Luisa was twenty-one when her aunt finally died. Although it had been five years of convalescences and backslides and stagnations, of never quite knowing whether a given day was recovery or the beginning of the end, when Tía Dolores began to fade in earnest they were both very sure. 

In the end, Tía Dolores died surprisingly peacefully in her sleep, alone, having contentedly terrorized the night nurse a mere hour before. Luisa had left the hospital (in the town next door, of course) for the night and missed the end of fifteen years of wrapping her life around a crotchety, hard old woman who was the only family she’d ever really known. 

She was there the day before, though. She had sat in the uncomfortable plastic chair beside her aunt’s bed and thought that she couldn’t possibly be much longer for this world. She tried, guiltily, to make the thought feel like something. This was it, after all, wasn’t it? Another end to rail against like she had for Javi, for her parents, old scars to ache in the rain. But Luisa didn’t feel like anything was cutting her open at all, so she sat in the chair like penance and tried to feel something. 

“Where will you go?” 

Luisa jumped, startled out of her determined sadness. 

“What?” 

“Where will you go?” Tía Dolores said again, never happy to be made to repeat herself. “When I’m _dead_ , girl.”

Too surprised to prevaricate, Luisa blurted, “Barcelona.”  

Tía Dolores gave her one of her sour little smiles, edged with something like approval. “Barcelona, good. Nothing like a big city for a girl to pretend to be someone else in.” Luisa opened and shut her mouth like a goldfish. Tía Dolores’ smile spread into something with actual teeth. 

“Stop gaping at me; that’s what cities are there for. That’s what I did, when I was young and silly like you.” She brooke into a fit of coughing, a high-pitched, whining bark like a seal, too loud to come from such a wracked and withered little body. Luisa silently handed her a glass of water, supported her back so she could drink it without dribbling down her front. Somehow, though, she was still smiling when she finished and leant back against the pillows again. She lifted her hand about an inch off the covers, looked at it like it belongs to someone else. 

“If I’d stayed there a little longer, maybe I could have been someone else, too.” She gave Luisa a glance with a good deal more wryness and less bitterness than she was used to seeing on her aunt’s withered, sour-prune face. “Bet you’d have liked that.” 

Luisa had no answer to that. “Where did you go?” she asked instead, realizing she’s never heard so much as a single story about her aunt’s time in the city, any city, had thought somehow that she’d always lived in a no-stoplight town in Extramadura, dry as the desert. 

“Sevilla,” Tía Dolores said, and somehow in that one word all the longing and romance and brilliance Luisa figured all humans must have in them somewhere but of which she had never seen so much of a scrap from her aunt trickled out and filled the room. Luisa looked at her aunt, at her collarbones pressing at her bed jacket and the skin falling away below, the visible veins at her temples, and thought about her as a young woman, looking like her mother in old pictures, clapping at flamenco dancers, dreaming of the riches at the ancient customs house, smelling the orange blossoms. 

“I never knew,” Luisa said, and then immediately felt stupid. But her aunt didn’t point it out like she normally would have, and she felt brave enough, listening to the heart monitor beep, to say, “I wish I’d known. I wish we could have known each other better. ”

Tía Dolores gave her another sideways glance and hacked out a laugh. “If wishes were horses, girl,” she said. “Nothing you could have done about that.”

She started coughing again then, and spoke no more until Luisa left for the night. And three hours later, she was dead. 

 

 

4. 

Just like her aunt had told her, Luisa pretended very hard to be someone else in Barcelona. That’s what big cities were for. At first, she told lies, big, attractive lies to match the city that found her friends and quickly lost them again when they grew too much to handle. After that, she learned to tell just little fibs to embellish, or better yet, just leave strategic silences and let people assume. She rarely corrected them. 

She’d never grown out of the orphan’s desperate need to have someone who would never lose interest in her and leave. And there wasn’t much interesting in a no-stoplight girl from Extremadura who made her living poking suction hoses around people’s gums. She’d also never grown out of the career caretaker’s need to be in control, to be, in some way, everything someone needed. 

So when she stumbled, literally, upon Jano in a too-expensive bar on the waterfront and found that all he wanted was someone who would listen to him and look beautiful for him and take care of him, she was caught. Jano wanted her body and her presence and made such pretty assumptions about where she came from and what she wanted, and Luisa felt secure.  

For his part, Jano had never gotten over being the smart child, the only child, the child terrified of not living up to expectations. Luisa wanted him for his brain and his money and what attention he would give her, and she was so beautiful and so willing to listen that he fell in quite easily to Luisa’s pattern of silences, so easy to fill with another anecdote or chapter of a book or kiss. 

Luisa, if you asked her, would say that yes, she and Jano loved each other. She certainly loved him, although she never did like to look to hard at the parts of their relationship that resembled the one she’d had with old Tía Dolores, of starched collars and sometimes just lacking the wherewithal to speak up for fear of a sideways glance or mocking laugh. She was happy, really. Being needed, even in a role mainly symbolic or receptive, is always intoxicating for people who have always had to rely only on themselves.

And thus, the first time she discovered Jano cheating on her, it was more than just a blow, it was a tremor through the foundations of the new normal she’d built on being everything she thought he needed. 

“I don’t understand!” she ranted to a coworker, a girl from Asturias whose silences and stories missing names matched hers well. She was more than halfway to drunk on tequila, even though Jano hated the smell. She was not in the mood to be accommodating for him tonight. “I don’t understand. I didn’t do anything wrong! I did- I do- _everything_. I go to his parties, I call his mother, I listen to his stories, I fuck him, I’m the- the fucking _perfect girlfriend.”_ She waved her glass for emphasis, slopping the alcohol over the side.  

“There was probably nothing you could have done, then,” Teresa told her, giving a wry shrug. “Some men just cheat. It’s got nothing to do with you and everything to do with them.” 

Luisa felt tears tingling in her nose. “I don’t _want_ it to have nothing to do with me,” she said, knowing she wasn’t quite making sense but not caring. 

“Hon, I’m telling you, break up with him,” Teresa said. “He’s obviously a cheating deadbeat.” 

“He’s not a deadbeat,” Luisa snapped automatically, then, “ _Fuck_.” 

Teresa’s knowing look stoked the angry little blaze in her throat to the point where tears seemed just about inevitable. Rather than stay and make a scene, she knocked back the rest of her drink and half-tripped off the bar platform, the little sting of humiliation at her unsteadiness just making her madder. 

“I’m going home,” she told Teresa, suffered herself to be poured into a cab, and fell asleep as soon as she got home. 

Jano was there when she woke up, hungover and still angry and desperately, desperately wanting to know how to be everything he needed again. Not that she could have put it into as many words. They screamed and fought and in the end Jano broke down crying and told her that he loved her, that he needed her, and, well. 

It worked that time, and the time after that, and eventually Luisa just learned to pretend not to notice the scheduling discrepancies, the whiffs of perfume, the names awkwardly cut out of stories. Jano still needed her, it was true, still loved her, still loved the way she listened and took care of him and knew just what he needed before he knew it himself. 

So when he asked her to move back to Mexico with him, she said yes. 

 

 

5. 

The same doctor who’d drawn her blood for the tests gave her the news. Luisa stared at the instruments on the sink counter and thought about sterilization procedure while he said words like _malignancy_  and _metastasis_ and _life expectancy._ She looked up when he paused, seemingly expecting some sort of ready response to the news her life was over. She had none. 

He looked very solemn in a way that seemed well-practiced. “There was nothing you could have done to prevent this,” he said. “Sometimes these things just happen.”

She walked out of the clinic in a daze. She hailed a taxi and sat silently in the backseat, then climbed the three flights of stairs to the new apartment, feeling very aware of every footfall, every breath, every heartbeat she suddenly imagined carrying evil little mites of disease through her every cell. She sat on the bed. She thought of Tía Dolores dying for five years, of the pill bottles and injections and bedsores and nightmares and the way her body wasted and twisted and ate itself up. The sun went down orange, the way it always seemed to here in this desert part of the country, like it did in Extremadura. 

When Jano called crying, Luisa felt almost ten years of caring for someone else before herself rise up and choke the word _cancer_ in her throat. For whatever reason- exhaustion, shock, a little bit of hope- she didn’t even think of another indiscretion. When he told her, of course, she felt like an idiot for not guessing, and then a worse idiot, and worse, because that was the first time he’d _told_ her, the first time she hadn’t pried it out of him, the first time he’d clearly felt sure enough she wouldn’t leave, because _where would she go?_   She wasn’t even in her own country. 

She hung up on Jano and started crying in earnest, all the tears that had refused to come since leaving the doctor’s office. She couldn’t keep Jano in Spain, and she couldn’t keep him here on on the other side of the world, and now she can't even keep her own body from going the wrong way, but Jano just wants to know that she’ll be there in the morning like she always is, the way he depends on. 

 _I don’t want to be needed this way_ , she thinks with sudden clarity, and lets herself cry until she’s exhausted.

 

 

+1

The nurse from the ontology division calls the next morning, late enough to be courteous to sleepers. Luisa wonders who sleeps late the morning after getting their death sentence. 

The woman chatters a little, clearly hoping for some kind of response, but Luisa is _not_ in the mood. 

“What do you want me to do?” she asks bluntly. 

The nurse stammers a little on the end of the line. She’s clearly new. “Um, there’s- well, there’s nothing you can really do,” she says, and Luisa clenches her fist in the sheets. She appreciates the honesty, although she can practically hear the nurse kicking herself as she spouts information on palliative care and live-in nurses, but _fuck that_. 

She thinks of Javi, dead in an instant and still dreaming of getting away, and Tía Dolores, who took five years to finally die, fighting bitterly the whole time. She thinks, _I really couldn’t have done anything for them_ , and _Like hell am I going that way_. 

“Thank you, but I’m fine,” she says, interrupting the nurse. 

“I’m sorry?” the nurse squeaks, clearly thrown. 

“No, thank you,” Luisa enunciates, very clearly. “I’m fine.” 

“But—” the nurse tries, and Luisa hangs up the phone before she can get any farther. 

Her hands are steady. Her eyes still itch a little from her little nervous breakdown earlier, and Luisa can tell that the tears are just waiting to pounce if she gives them half an inch. But fuck that. She’s going to escape like she’s sixteen all over again, like she never really had the chance.

She digs through Jano’s boxes until she finds his address book, dials the Iturbide’s phone number. Tenoch and his friend are seventeen and just as stupid and trapped as she and Javi had ever been. Seventeen-year-olds never think they need anyone. 

This time, she knows it’s coming. This time, even though there’s nothing she could have done and nothing she can do, she’s going to do what she can.

The phone rings for a long time, and Luisa can’t deny the punched-out sound of relief she makes when someone finally answers. 

“Hi, Tenoch,” she says. “It’s Luisa.”

 

.


End file.
